"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross."
-- Sinclair Lewis

Monday, February 27, 2006

JOE LIEBERMAN-- BAD FOR DEMOCRATS, BAD FOR CONNECTICUT, BAD FOR OUR COUNTRY

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Lieberman works hard at coming across as a nice man, and a nice man above partisan politics to boot. But Joe Lieberman has never been a nice man, just a successful actor, and he's never been above partisan politics, just a vicious and cut-throat practitioner of the art-- with a big smile. He started his political career in 1970 by going up against a Democratic Party boss, Arthur Barbieri, and outwitting him in manipulating elderly voters in Crawford Manor, a government-built retirement community, in an election for Connecticut State Senate in which Lieberman was challenging New Haven Democratic incumbent Ed Marcus. Lieberman "recognized that parties no longer deliver all the votes and money needed to win elections. You have to build your own machine based on personal loyalty. Lieberman recognized that too many voters had grown wary of automatically pulling party levers. [This very blue state now has more registered Independents than registered Democrats-- and has been regularly electing Republicans to the Governor's Mansion.] And appearing to the public as a nice guy now counts for more than breaking knuckles in the back room, because the media (especially TV) replaced the party as the prime means of reaching voters. Bland was in. Non-threatening was in. Plus you had to know how to make jokes on Imus and POLITICALLY INCORRECT."

But Lieberman was dealt 2 crucial political defeats before he started his real ascendancy. The party bosses bushwhacked him in a 1978 bid to become Lieutenant Governor and he was defeated in a bid for Congress by a Republican 2 years later. In his self-serving book, IN PRAISE OF PUBLIC LIFE, Lieberman delineates the 3 lessons he took away from that race: to rely on daily tracking polls, to never "let your opponent go negative on you without giving at least as good as you get in return," and, most important, to "never, ever let anyone attack you as a 'high-taxing, big-spending liberal.'" That third one's the one he's based the rest of his career in politics on.

In 1982 he ran for Connecticut Attorney General as a law-and-order candidate inching slightly towards the right and glomming on to an aggressively "pro-family" position that has served him very well. He won. For the next 6 years he marketed himself assiduously to Connecticut citizens. In 1988 he challenged progressive Republican incumbent U.S. Senator Lowell Weicker-- attacking from the right-- and beat him. Lieberman ran a brutal and viciously negative campaign, mocking Weicker personally and even red-baiting him for being soft on Castro (William Buckley formed a PAC to raise money for Lieberman and later Jack Kemp called him "one of us.") Today Lieberman is far more popular in Connecticut with Republicans and with conservatives than he is with Democrats and with progressives, and in 1988 conservatives gave him his small margin of victory over Weicker. Once in the Senate he went even further right and pro-corporate. "He accumulated the most pro-corporate record of any Senate Democrat-- and the millions of campaign dollars that came with them." He joined the DLC and became their president-- before that, the domain of right-leaning Southern Democrats.

This is when Lieberman, like a snake, shed his old skin entirely, discarding the last vestiges of anything vaguely Democratic, and became what he is today: a right-wing demagogue, a really vile politician who belongs in the Republican Party, not the Democratic Party. He made racism quasi-acceptable by framing it as being against unfair affirmative action. An unrelenting homophobe, he joined Jesse Helms' campaign of defamation of gay people and he joined forces with far right extremists like Christian Coalition head Ralph Reed to promote school prayer and voucher programs for religionist schools. And then he got into my own business and my growing hatred for Joe Lieberman turned personal.

First a little disclosure. DWT is the nom de guerre for Howie Klein, former punk rock dj, former founder and president of alternative rock label 415 Records, former general manager and vice president of Sire Records and former president of Reprise Records. I am now retired from the music business but there is no question that Joe Lieberman's frontal assault on the music business was something that very much disturbed me. In fact, several of his and his allies' prime targets were personal friends as well as business associates. (And one of the albums he fussed and fretted about most obnoxiously, BODY COUNT, was a record I was Executive Producer of.)

The story starts with the founding of the PMRC and if you're too young to remember, you ought to read about that sad chapter in American political/cultural history (in that link back there or either this one here or this Gore-bashing right wing point of view here). The principals' names should all sound familiar: Tipper Gore (wife of Al), Susan Baker (wife of Bush family retainer/fixer James), Nancy Thurmond (one of the Strom wives), Lynn Cheney (lesbian pornography writer and wife of alcoholic current vice president Dick). This gaggle of powerful men's wives was the forerunner for three of Washington's most celebrated, loud-mouthed hypocrites: Bill Bennett, Sam Brownback and, of course, Joe Lieberman, who took up their campaign almost as soon as he was elected.

To quote the Republican National Committee (who carelessly hypocritically left out Lynn Cheney's participation in the PMRC, the group's mission "was to clean up raunchy lyrics and suggestive album covers in the music industry. The group pushed for a 'rating system similar to that for films, printed lyrics on album covers and under-the-counter obscurity for covers depicting violence or explicit sexual themes'... In August 1985, under pressure from PMRC and other parents’ groups, record companies agreed to place the warning 'Parental Guidance: Explicit Lyrics' on albums and cassettes containing explicit lyrics. However, for Tipper and PMRC, that language was not enough and the group continued its war on controversial music lyrics," eventually bringing the mess before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. Artists like Jello Biafra, Ice-T and Frank Zappa showed how dangerous the PMRC's plans were for freedom of speech and expression, with Zappa explaining to the senators that "the complete list of PMRC demands reads like an instruction manual for some sinister kind of toilet training program to house-break all composers and performers because of the lyrics of a few," adding, dramatically "Ladies, how dare you?... Bad facts make bad law, and people who write bad laws are in my opinion more dangerous than songwriters who celebrate sexuality. Freedom of speech, freedom of religious thought, and the right to due process for composers, performers and retailers are imperiled if the PMRC and the major labels consummate this nasty bargain." (Among the artists specifically attacked by the PMRC were Madonna, Prince, Judas Priest, AC/DC, Def Leppard, Black Sabbath, Cyndi Lauper and Sheena Easton.)

People often ask me what happened and what was the big deal. Lieberman knew exactly what he was doing-- far better than the batty wives' group that preceded him-- when he insisted on ratings on CDs and it had nothing to do with helping parents supervise their children. Few people understand-- the way Lieberman did-- that in the late 80s something like 70% of all recorded music was sold in stores in malls and that malls have very stringent lease arrangements about their tenants not selling "pornography." Over the course of this controversy two of the Senate's most uptight and close-minded prigs, Sam Brownback and Lieberman, pushed for the kinds of stickers that would make it impossible for the kind of music they objected to-- like anything talking about masturbation or homosexuality, for example-- to be stocked by 70% of American retailers. The effect inside the music business was chilling-- and instantaneous. Suddenly a whole new internal bureaucracy had to be created to police every record and suddenly artists were being pressured-- sometimes overtly and sometimes less overtly-- to cave in to demands by two really reactionary fundamentalists whose values are far from mainstream. In one fell swoop Lieberman destroyed an alliance between young voters and the Democratic Party that had started with John Kennedy's election as he ham-fistedly savaged their culture for his own political ambitions.

Paula O'Keefe's insightful 1997 article called "Who Watches The Watchmen?" is an excellent account of Lieberman's fanatical post-PMRC hysterics and extremism on cultural issues which lead to his crazy and ultimately failed 2001 legislation, the Media Marketing Accountability Act, a bill to prohibit the marketing of “adult-rated media,” i.e., movies, music, and computer games containing violent or sexual material, to young people under the age of 17. Lieberman sought to empower the Federal Trade Commission to regulate the advertising of music, movies and games to young people. The proposed legislation, if enacted, would have injected a federal agency into decisions about the marketing of movies, music, and electronic games — and thereby potentially into decisions about what sorts of movies, music, and games are produced.

For part of the time I was president of Reprise an old friend of mine, Danny Goldberg, was chairman of Warner Bros Records, Reprise's parent company. Danny is a inspiring progressive and a brilliant thinker and writer. His book, DISPATCHES FROM THE CULTURE WAR-- HOW THE LEFT LOST TEEN SPIRIT, offers some of the best insights into the real Joe Lieberman anywhere. Danny acknowledges Lieberman's "affable demeanor," but points out his "self-righteous, intolerant, Puritanical streak." When former LBJ advisor Jack Valenti, then head of the movie industry trade organization, and a friend of Lieberman's was asked by Danny if he had ever told Lieberman about the First Amendment implications of the type of censorship he was advocating, Valenti replied, "When people get very religious and they believe their course of action is sanctioned by a higher authority, there's not much you can do to communicate with them-- left, right or center." Hmmm... maybe that's why Bush and Lieberman are always kissing!

Danny explains that while he and other people in the entertainment community have disagreed with politicians like the Clintons and Al Gore on cultural matters, they were still able to support them. "However, he writes, "I would never under any circumstances support or vote for a ticket with Joe Lieberman on it. Not only is he one of the most conservative Democrats with a national profile, but his self-righteousness about religion and venom toward popular culture would make him a serious threat to a free and intellectually diverse American society if he were to gain more power."

Danny isn't alone in his assessment of Lieberman. Scott Goodstein, a long time Democratic political consultant and co-founder of Military Free Zone, was Executive Director of punkvoter when they mobilized and helped register over a million previously unregistered young voters in 2004. Professionally unemotional about politicians, Lieberman comes close to getting his goat. "It's unfortunate that politicians like Joe Lieberman are so out of touch with young voters. He's one of that growing group of politicians who constantly blame music and entertainment as the root of all evil, support un-American legislation like the PATRIOT Act and other forms of censorship, and repeatedly judge and marginalize the next generation without ever having a real dialogue. Lieberman and politicians that use this moral superiority rhetoric instead of focusing on solving real problems-- like the hundred plus education cuts that this administration is currently proposing-– are simply turning off young voters instead of encouraging the next generation to continue their involvement in politics."

A few weeks ago I met Ned Lamont, the progressive Democrat who has challenged Lieberman, at a friend's house here in Los Angeles. He inspired a sense of confidence in me that was the polar opposite of how I reacted when I met Lieberman, basically a smarmy character oozing fake piety, fake openness and fake friendliness. Lamont listened when I spoke and asked all the right questions. I was surprised. A week later my friend Jane spoke with Lamont and mentioned my name to him and he remarked how I had explained the way Lieberman had used the Music Industry-- and youth culture-- as a fund-raising tool by demonizing it and doing all he could to cause discord and disharmony. The Joe Liebermans and Sam Brownbacks of the world are entitled to their moralistic world view but government should not be shoving that down the throats of the whole population. Not every taxpayer feels that if a song mentions homosexuality or masturbation (to go back to the 2 examples that offended Lieberman which I cited above) that it needs to be kept out of record stores. Big government is not an effective or suitable substitute for good parenting. Ned Lamont understood that intuitively. Lieberman will never understand that, just like he'll never understand how disastrous the Bush Regime's occupation of Iraq is for the Israel that drives his decisions.

If you don't vote in Connecticut but would like to see Ned Lamont retire Lieberman from public life, you can help by donating to Lamont's campaign via this ACT BLUE Page. Every cent goes directly to his campaign.

34 Comments:

As the Owner of DumpJoe.com a member of The Branford,Ct Democratic Town Committee and a VERY ACTIVE DEMOCRAT I can assure you Ned Lamonts Campaign has a Very Good Base of support and is catching fire here in CT.

Lieberman Dragging out every elected official to Swear their allegience to him last week may have been the worst thing he could have done.I know from my sources that todays phonecalls at all of those offices were mostly hostile.

Great Article! I linked to in the comments section athttp://lamontblog.blogspot.com/

& Don't forget. No woman in her right mind should support Lieberman after he stabbed us all in the back by not supporting the Alito filibuster. Not to mention the smug smarmy email he sent out to us constituents. It is the last straw! & Now look at what women in South Dakota have to put up with.

Did anyone hear about this? Joseph Lieberman was messing with the rights of the hearing impaired. This comes from a FireDogLake Post:A few years ago, Joe tried to block government funding for closed-captioning of the Jerry Springer show. Apparently adults who are hearing impaired should not be exposed to what hearing children could watch. He also seemed to assume that hearing-impaired adults were not also taxpayers.

Several artists who I worked with at Reprise have responded to the post today. Rickie Lee told me it was ok to post her response here. Enjoy:

Lieberman was the first indication that there were actually Republicans in the Democratic Party. Forgive my naivity, but before the series of betrayals by Lieberman against important progressive legislation... I thought people with his sensibilities, voting for the war, for the Patriot Act, and voting against Medicare benefits for a very severely taxed generation of elderly ill, and against the few ideological stands the so-called left has been willing to brush up against since Bush took office... here were registered Republicans. Herr Lieberman helped me realize there is not much of a fine line left between the middle of the right and the edge of the left. We have moved so far over that even middle America stands perched on one foot, with it's one strand of hair tossed across its frowning face, trying to straighten the coffee in a cup that will forever be leaning far too right to ever feel balanced again.

No good American can go out into the street today and not turn grey with nausea at the complacency of every single newspaper, financial institution, and influencial individual in the conspiracy to keep this unqualified, uneducated, unelected criminal in office. Lieberman was an important candidate, and he, above all of them, is a turn coat who helped to nulify the potency of the left.

And what's more, it would be a logical deduction that Lieberman has moved to the right of his mentor William F. Buckley on the war issue. Daily Kos has more today.http://www.dailykos.com/storyonl...2/27/12423/ 0041

If I could choose one Democrat to replace in our government, it would be Joe Lieberman.

I was happy to click on the ACT BLUE link and support the Lamont campaign and encourage everyone to do so!

Lieberman’s omnipresent public image has probably done more to blur the distinction between Democrats and Republicans than anything I can think of. No wonder young people get turned off to the perceived lack of choice and don’t vote!

Lieberman's assault on the music business hit close to home for me.Howie released an album by my band on his 415 Label back in 1980.Not only were some of the bands on Howie’s label not commercial, they were ANTI-COMMERCIAL! Howie was one of the primary players that created the early punk and alternative music scene in S.F. at that time. The scene was every bit as much political as it was creative. So much so that when Jello from the Dead Kennedys ran against Dianne Fienstein for for mayor he got 10% of the vote.

Although the media seemed to portray Lieberman and the PMRC as do-gooders trying to “clean up raunchy lyrics and suggestive album covers”, there was always a very real undercurrent of them trying to stifle political and artistic dissent against the status quo. God forbid that musicians encourage our young people to think.Aren’t we all so much better off by getting our music through the AMERICAN IDOL system!

This is all interesting for me, since--while I certainly remember Lieberman unseating Lowell Weicker--I never paid close attention to his politics, and I guess I was sucked in by the affable, commonsensical persona he projected in his frequent Imus appearances (before I broke that habit).

What is that ham actors say? Once you can fake sincerity, you can fake it all?

Of course our Joe eventually came out of his closet, and in the Age of Bush there hasn't been much excuse for mistaking the cynical, closed-minded reactionary he must have been all along. It's all the more embarrassing having such a repulsive figure be so publicly Jewish. I'm reminded of the invariable reaction of the late father of a friend of mine, a refugee from Hitler's Berlin, who always felt special pain when a Jewish person engaged in public behavior that brings shame on all Jews.

I'm heartened by the showing here from Nutmeg Staters, who could do the country--and mankind--a great favor by throwing this bum out.

You know, I actually did read that some Cyndi Lauper songs like What's going On (an Anti-War song),and Boy Blue (a song she wrote for a friend who died of AIDs) obviously had no chance at getting much radio play back in the Reagan 80's.

keninny {kisses} and good on you for breaking your Imus habit. The way I look at it, Joe *courts.* He *courts* the prochoice crowd. He *courts* the citizens concerned about Israel. & then ultimately he exploits us & stabs us in the back by not voting for the Alito filibuster. The show is up. Game's over. The man behind the curtain is a Bush backing Pro Saudi oilman neocon. No person of any ethnic, creed class or color should ever be ashamed that another person of the same ethnicity, creed, class or color is part of the lunatic fringe. If that were the case, all of us CT people would be hiding our heads in the sand because of Ann Coulter. Chin up, soldier!

It's obvious today's left wants Joe out, but in blaming Joe for the PMRC's agenda, you've got to tag Al Gore and the Democrat party as well.

Neither Gore nor Lieberman give a god damm about freedom of artistic expression. They were too willing to regulate the music and film business as a way of showing some BS cred with uptight Americans and extending the reach and power of the federal government over people's lives at the same time.

For the purposes of defeating Joe in CT, Howie paints Lieberman as republican and the PMRC as bi-partisan, but the threat leveled at the music business in 2000 was DEM all the way.

Here's some history for youngsters or those with dim memories or weak intellects.

Thanks Mr Anonymous for your comments. I have read this line of Republican trash for years but I lived through this and I can tell you that-- despite the later attempts by the Republican National Committee to use the whole PMRC debacle to attack Gore's bid for the presidency (and I have a link up in the article to the original RNC document)-- it is false. The Republicans seem willing to throw James Baker's wife Susan under the wheels but they have carefully tried to re-write history to erase Lynn Cheney. Lieberman's starring part was a post-PMRC role where he teamed up with two full-fledged Republican scolds, Bill Bennett and Sam Brownback. The role of several Democrats-- particularly Tipper Gore, but also, to a somewhat lesser extent, Hillary Clinton and Al Gore-- was revolting to many Democrats andRepublicans, but as Danny Goldberg captured in the comment I used from his book, what makes Lieberman stand out was his "self-righteousness about religion and venom toward popular culture [that] would make him a serious threat to a free and intellectually diverse American society."

I don't know what Kool-Aid you've been drinking lately, but I assume that it's red. The PMRC was indeed a bi-partisan boondoggle. Those of us who were paying attention and outraged at the time knew it then and we continue to know it now. Your blatant lies won't change the facts of who sat on the PMRC.

I'm flattered by your reply. I would not deny nor minimize the participation of Susan Baker, Nancy Thurmond or whoever else in PMRC, although I have not been able to link Lynn Cheney to PMRC in a google search other than mentions to your piece here today. Perhaps you could substantiate her involvement.

My large point is that history is history. The PMRC's heyday in the '80's was Tipper Gore all the way, with Al smiling on approvingly.

You certainly cannot claim that eatthestate.org and Messrs. St. Clair and Cockburn are right wing hacks. And don't forget the genuine fallout of PMRC during the Clinton administration. From the St. Clair/Cockburn piece:

". . .Ed Meese was successfully ridiculed by liberals for his censorship campaign. The Gores survived intact and their concerns became administration policy in 1993, with the successful drive for the V-chip, the war on teenage mothers (often linked to music and to MTV) and kindred moral campaigns. And now the PMRC crusade is being Born Again in Campaign 2000. All this year Al Gore has boasted about his wife's PMRC campaign, most recently on the Oprah Show. "She was early and she was right," he has said. . . ."

Richard Goldstein has similar sentiments in the Voice, about the 2000 Senate Commerce Committee hearings with Lieberman [AND John McCain.]

Scary MoveWhen Both Parties Team Up to Target Hollywood, Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid!by Richard GoldsteinOctober 4 - 10, 2000http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0040,goldstein,18690,1.html

It's ironic that the "Parental Advisory Explicit Lyric" sticker that came out of all this became a selling tool, letting the kids easily find which records are the cool ones.

Anyway, I stand by my comments. For almost 20 years, Gore and then Lieberman chased "family values" credibility by attacking the music business and Hollywood. Neither deserve a shred of respect for the whole craven play, whatever your politics. I'm just, as Randy Jackson is fond of saying, keepin' it real.

Mr Anonymous,Don't be patronizing. This is not only about PMRC anymore. Lieberman has played his Democrat prochoice colleagues and constituents like monkeys. (See Alito filibuster.) We CT folks deserve a reasonable voice to represent us. Gore has not always proved to be progressive, I agree, but to my mind he has redeemed himself (see Moveon.org speech.) Lieberman is moving further to the right and proving himself to be a neocon & only nominally prochoice. I applaud Klein's efforts to shed light on Lieberman's history. It gives us CT citizens the ammunition we need to fight the good fight.

And besides. Lynne Cheney is the worst of the worst. She's written at least one horrible manifesto Telling the Truth. (No, and it's not that rare and out of print lesbian novel, Sisters.) G** only knows what she did to NEH during her tenure. But the wicked witch probably left a legacy.

I just posted something similar on DailyKos, but I'm going to put it here, too, because I think some perspective is in order. Lieberman is far from the most conservative Democrat in the Senate (check out the new National Journal rankings) and is, in fact, close to a hero on environmental issues (he's led the fight against drilling in the Arctic, and it's the McCain-Lieberman climate change bill). On cultural questions, he's more conservative than I am, but I don't believe that anyone who stands where he does ought to be shouted out of the party. There should be room for people who think that marriage is between a man and a woman and quotas are wrong, both very reasonable positions. And there should be room for people who criticize the culture. I can't blame parents for being uneasy about Grand Theft Auto being peddled to their kids. I don't like the idea that moderation is always a form of weakness, which is what you all seem to imply.

Look at all these Democrats who National Journal ranks as more socially conservative (on economic policy, the list of who's more conservative is even longer, including Biden, Kohl, Johnson, Carper, and Stabenow):

Ricki Lee Jones is a great singer/songwriter and beautiful, intelligent woman. Joe Lieberman is a Zionist tool who sucks bad and whose ass I wouldn't piss in, even if I knew his guts were on fire. Just by way of contrast, you know...